Archive for the month “November, 2017”

As writers, we all dream of an unending vista of available writing time. No breaks, no interruptions—other than spending 40% of our time compulsively checking Twitter of course—just one neverending sweet, sweet writing zone. Wide open spaces like this are normally a good thing. It’s what we think we want. But when it comes to creativity, sometimes too much space allows for too much procrastination (so we’ve heard… *checks Amazon Prime to see if the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has dropped yet*). When there’s no specific destination, you can end up spinning in circles, getting nowhere, making yourself dizzy with all the possibilities.

Contrary to what most of us might think, deadlines are not creativity killers. Deadlines provide direction and structure. A deadline gets the heart pumping and silences the inner critic that might otherwise go on for days like someone that’s just discovered how to thread their 280 character tweets…

Here are my latest uploads to YesSource, my Yes rarities youtube page (about which you can read here). This post is another addition to my series of Yes music posts and a collection of all my Yes-related posts is here. Yes, of course, is a, if not the, premier progressive rock band, and I am an enormous fan of it.

Over the course of my career, I have written extensively on a wide variety of family law issues and legal principles. These writings have been published in The Legal Intelligencer, Upon Further Review, and The Pennsylvania Family Lawyer as well as posted onto my blog. I have collected these articles and blog posts and have listed them below. Thanks for reading!

A lawsuit was filed Wednesday in state court in New York by Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz who was a kosher supervisor for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (“OU”) and who certified products of Manischewitz Co.– a major producer of Passover foods– for more than 20 years. As reported by NJ Advance Media and AP, the suit, filed just days before Passover, claims that Horowitz was forced to take a long leave of absence after complaining that he was being pressured by the OU to be more lax in his inspections of certain products. Horowitz claims that OU cooperated because it was afraid that Manischewitz would move to a different kosher certifying agency. Manischewitz denies the charges. The lawsuit seeks millions of dollars in damages for emotional distress and damage to reputation.

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in the The Philadelphia Inquirer which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

Did everyone abide by those precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.

Was everything perfect during the period of bourgeois cultural hegemony? Of course not. There was racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism. However, steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned. Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.

This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s. A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society. This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender, and now sexual preference.

And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

Would the re-embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low. Those who live by the simple rules that most people used to accept may not end up rich or hold elite jobs, but their lives will go far better than they do now. All schools and neighborhoods would be much safer and more pleasant. More students from all walks of life would be educated for constructive employment and democratic participation.

But restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture — the academics, media, and Hollywood — to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden. Instead of bashing the bourgeois culture, they should return to the 1950s posture of celebrating it.

By Amy Wax and originally published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9, 2017 and can be found here.

Hello folks. As many of you know, I am a volunteer for the Christian Legal Clinics of Philadelphia; you can learn more about us here. We help literally hundreds of people every year try and secure justice in the legal system through pro bono or low fee legal services. We are always trying to improve our services, help more people, and be able to do more for the people we are already helping.

The Clinic’s annual promotional video for 2017 is now out and I am featured in it! Although I do not really view what I do as particularly noteworthy, I am thankful, humbled, and honored by the recognition. I hope that as the weeks and months progress, the Clinic can continue to grow and flourish in its service to those in need in the Philadelphia area. Please continue to pray for us and donate to us your time, talents, and treasure as you feel led (if you want to give to our ministry, please see here). Thanks to everyone who makes this vital ministry possible and thanks, above all, to God from whom all blessings flow.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation this week filed suit in a California federal district court challenging the constitutionality of a 14-foot tall granite Latin cross in Santa Clara’s Memorial Cross Park. The complaint (full text) in Freedom From Religion Foundation v. City of Santa Clara, (ND CA, filed 4/20/2016), says that the cross was donated and placed on city-owned property in 1953 by the Lion’s Club to mark the site of the second Spanish Catholic mission established in the city in 1777. The site continues to be maintained by the city. Plaintiff claims that the city’s actions violate the Establishment Clause of the federal and state constitutions as well as the “no aid” clause of California’s constitution. FFRF issued a press release announcing the filing of the lawsuit and containing a photo of the disputed marker.

Nathan Rudolph, my friend and fellow parishioner at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, has started a comic strip which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. With his permission, I will repost them here after he posts them. I think my readers will appreciate them as much as I do as they are rather insightful with a snarky edge. Enjoy!